A kindly illusion about their importance in the scheme of
things is Nature's instrument for getting work out of men. "Don't you
think Flaubert took himself too seriously?" I heard a lady novelist ask a
gentleman practitioner. Certainly his correspondence with George Sand
reveals an anchorite of letters, who tortured the phrase and sacrificed
sleep to the adjective, and the brothers De Goncourt--themselves very
serious gentlemen--have recorded how he considered his book as good as
finished because he had invented the "dying falls" of the music of his
periods. But if Flaubert had sufficiently contemplated the infinities,
the immense indifference of things, if, like the astronomer in search of
a creed, he had concentrated his vision on the point to which the whole
solar system is drifting, French prose would have lost some of its most
wonderful pages; and had the late Mr. Pater been less troubled by the
rose-leaf of style and more by the thorns of the time, English prose
would have been the poorer by harmonies and felicities unsurpassed and
unsurpassable. This is to ignore Pater the Philosopher and Pater the
Critic. Of these persons there will be varying estimates. They have even
in a sense, through the extravagances of a disciple, been subjected to
the verdict of a British jury--a sufficiently ironic revenge upon the
fastidious shrinker from the Philistines; and though, of course, it was
not theories of art and philosophy that were being "tried by jury," yet
these side-issues contributed to prejudice the twelve good men and true.
Pages:
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332